Wilsons on the register, page-5

Adveritas scores big institutional supporterYolanda RedrupReporterDec 3, 2020 – 4.48pm
ShareSmall cap digital ad fraud prevention software company Adveritas has added a major institutional investor to its register, with Wilson Asset Management buying up a small stake in the business.
The fund, which now owns almost 3 per cent of the business as part of its WAM Microcap fund, bought into the company last month on the back of Citadel chief executive Mark McConnell increasing his stake and selling them on the firm's potential.
Speaking to The Australian Financial Review, Wilson Asset Management lead portfolio manager Oscar Oberg said he sees huge potential for the business.
"It's a small position in the fund, but there’s a clear need for this and it’s a one stop shop across all this fraud detection software," he said."We're doing our own work on the company... But one of the reasons we like it is there’s not many places you can play the cyber crime, hacking, fraud detection exposure on the ASX.
"If we see a few more client wins and the annual recurring revenue increase, we could be a lot higher (in terms of our position) than we are today.

"The company's flagship software TrafficGuard detects, mitigates and reports on digital ad fraud (in which fraudsters create fake websites to make money selling ad impressions generated via bots).

According to Juniper Research, advertisers lost $US42 billion of ad spend globally in 2019 to fraudulent activities committed via online, mobile and in-app advertising, and this is predicted to blow out to $US100 billion by 2023In the March sell off the business slipped as low as 6.5¢, but since then it's regained its losses and was trading at 21¢ on Wednesday, giving it a market capitalisation of $74 million.

Citadel Group chief executive Mark McConnell sits on the Adveritas board, having joined after he bought into the business in November 2018 ,when it was previously named Tech Mpire.
While the company started out with a big focus on advertisers, its now mounting a push for the gaming and gambling sector too, winning GVC Holdings as a client. GVC's local subsidiaries include Ladbrokes and Neds.
Other major Adveritas clients include major Asian ridesharing business Go-Jek and Latin American consumer tech business Rappi.For the three months to September 30, Adveritas grew its customer numbers by 25 per cent, resulting in the software company having more than 50 revenue generating clients. Its "freemium" client number leapt 80 per cent to 1050 subscribers.
Mr McConnell said his family office spent more than $100,000 conducting "bottom up, fundamental" due diligence on Adveritas before he invested and joined the board."I’ve been in and around cyber, fraud and IT security for about 20 years and have kept an eye on a bunch of those nano caps for ages," he said.
"If you’re going to join the board and align with management of a nano cap, you have to protect yourself from reputational damage. I spoke to clients and they were beating multibillion dollar VC-backed firms when it was a $3-mill business in Perth.
"We’re signing up some of the biggest unicorns... in the region and it's a very small business."